nd they never pay a penny, nor even hoist a flag,
unless the day is fine, and the flag wants drying. But come along, papa,
now. I really can not wait; and they will have done it all without us."

"Janetta, take the glass and get the focus. I will come presently,
presently. In about two minutes--by the time that you are ready."

"Very well, papa. It is very good of you. I see quite clearly what
you want to do; and I hope you will do it. But you promise not to play
another game now?"

"My dear, I will promise that with pleasure. Only do please be off about
your business."

The rector was a most inveterate and insatiable chess-player. In the
household, rather than by it, he was, as a matter of lofty belief,
supposed to be deeply engaged with theology, or magisterial questions of
almost equal depth, or (to put it at the lowest) parochial affairs,
the while he was solidly and seriously engaged in getting up the sound
defense to some Continental gambit. And this, not only to satisfy
himself upon some point of theory, but from a nearer and dearer point of
view--for he never did like to be beaten.

At present he was laboring to discover the proper defense to a new and
slashing form of the Algaier gambit, by means of which Robin Lyth had
won every game in which he had the move, upon their last encounter.
The great free-trader, while a boy, had shown an especial aptitude for
chess, and even as a child he had seemed to know the men when first, by
some accident, he saw them. The rector being struck by this exception
to the ways of childhood--whose manner it is to take chess-men for
"dollies," or roll them about like nine-pins--at once included in
the education of "Izunsabe," which he took upon himself, a course of
elemental doctrine in the one true game. And the boy fought his way up
at such a pace that he jumped from odds of queen and rook to pawn and
two moves in less than two years. And now he could almost give odds to
his tutor, though he never presumed to offer them; and trading as he
did with enlightened merchants of large Continental sea-ports, who had
plenty of time on their hands and played well, he imported new openings
of a dash and freedom which swallowed the ground up under the feet of
the steady-going players, who had never seen a book upon their favorite
subject. Of course it was competent to all these to decline such fiery
onslaught; but chivalry and the true love of analysis (which without may
none play chess)